Communication networks have become a valuable measure for use in exchanging information among geographically separated customers. With increasing costs for travel and lodging, conferencing arrangements offer an alternative to face-to-face meetings by allowing all conferees to participate in routine meetings which can be called on short notice.
While many teleconferencing arrangements have been available in the past, they lack certain features found in the present arrangement.
In one form of prior art conference arrangement, the originator of the conference must call an operator and give the operator the telephone numbers of all conferees and the time that the conference is to be held. If changes are to be made during the conference, such as adding another party, the operator must be signaled and must interrupt the conference while establishing a connection to the new conferee.
While these arrangements are suitable for their intended purpose, they require the services of an operator to establish and supervise the conference in order to ascertain if any changes are to be made. This puts an additional work load on the operator's position, and the operator spends an inordinate amount of time dialing each conferee and waiting for each conferee to answer. Thus, to alleviate operator position work load and render more privacy to a conference service, it is desirable to automate many of the functions associated with conference calls.
Automatic conference arrangements are also known in the prior art. In certain automatic group call arrangements, the conference originator can dial a preassigned code to summon the group of conferees designated by the code. Also, in typical dial-up conferences, the originator can dial each conferee in a manner similar to the operator's procedure described above.
Of course, the group call arrangement lacks the flexibility of permitting parties to be added to the conference. On the other hand, the dial-up conference arrangement may be troublesome for the originator particularly when complicated dialing procedures are involved to establish a large conference or to implement numerous special service features such as selectively conferencing data terminals which may or may not be associated with the customers participating in an audio conference.